British shipping interests, also, were vigorous in their opposition to the Bagdad Railway. A trans-Mesopotamian railway, they knew, would absorb some of the through traffic to the East, and the competition of the locomotive might compel a general readjustment of freight rates. Furthermore, it was one of the avowed purposes of the Bagdad line to acquire the profitable Indian mails concession from the British Government; this would be equivalent to the withdrawal of a subsidy from the steamship lines operating to the East. It was not for their own sake, but for the sake of British commerce, however, that these shipping interests objected to the construction of the Bagdad line! They warned the British public that the proposed railway would adversely affect the traffic passing through the Suez Canal; inasmuch as the United Kingdom was a stockholder in the Canal, this was the concern of every English citizen. They pointed out that the kilometric subsidy which had been guaranteed the Railway was to be paid from an increase in the customs duties; thus, it was charged, British commerce would be obliged to contribute indirectly to the dividends of the _Deutsche Bank_. The improvement of communications between Middle Europe and the Near East would be almost certain to disturb British trade with Turkey; the feared and hated “Made in Germany” trade-mark might exert its hypnotic influence in a region where British commerce heretofore had been preëminent. If, in addition, the German owners of the Bagdad Railway should choose to grant discriminatory rates to German goods, a severe body-blow would be dealt British economic interests in the Ottoman Empire. The completion of this Railway would bring with it all sorts of German interference in the Near East and undermine British commercial and maritime interests in the region.[16]